People have mixed feeling about the West Texas desert.
For some, the dust and sand and withered plants and bleached animal skulls paint a dreary picture of desolation — a bleak, unlovable landscape, like an orphan abandoned by a cruel Mother Nature.
For others, a desert is the perfect place to land your space capsule following a 10-minute tourist visit to the edge of space and back.
That’s how the desert may have looked to 90-year-old William Shatner yesterday morning, as he and three other crew members rode the parachutes down, down, down, onto property owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who also owns the ‘Blue Origins’ space capsule and the rocket that lifted the capsule 66 miles above the earth, on a flight shorter than most YouTube videos.
William Shatner. The guy who pretended to travel around the galaxy in the Starship Enterprise as Captain James T. Kirk, boldly going where no man (or woman) had gone before. He actually went into space, yesterday, and is now officially the oldest person to (mostly) escape the earth’s atmosphere. He’s also the first Star Trek character to escape the earth’s atmosphere.
I would personally like to see the entire Enterprise crew fly into space, at some point. After all those years of pretending.
“Everybody in the world needs to do this,” Mr. Shatner announced to the waiting crowd after landing. “That was unbelievable.”
Of course — in spite of Mr, Shatner’s extensive experience with space flight — that’s a ridiculous suggestion. There’s no way “everybody in the world” could fly in a little capsule that holds four people, even if they took turns. If four people were shot into space every day, including Christmas, it would take 19.2 million years to give everybody a ride, and by then, most of us would be dead.
So it was probably smart of Jeff Bezos to start sending up people, like Mr. Shatner, who are getting up there in years, because they don’t have as much time to fool around waiting, as the rest of us do.
Like giving the vaccines to the old people first. Same idea.
But the main thing is, if you want to sell “space tourist” rides in a space capsule — even 10 minute rides — it’s a great marketing ploy to offer a seat to a TV celebrity, on your second scheduled flight. You’re likely to get great media coverage, even in the Pagosa Daily Post.
But I’m thinking about how the West Texas desert must have looked, out of those capsule windows… waiting for the ground crew to arrive… after a couple of minutes floating weightless, 66 miles above the earth, looking out the picture windows at the blue orb and the jet black sky… a scene only a few hundred people have ever seen.
Sitting there in the desert, waiting… did the crew appreciate the sagebrush, that somehow survives in that parched landscape?
Or wonder how small tan lizards somehow find sustenance in the middle of a desert?
Did they notice tiny birds, flitting from bush to bush, singing in spite of the grueling heat?
Is it possible that Mr. Shatner was actually talking about the West Texas desert, when he said, “Everybody in the world needs to do this…”?
Because that’s not entirely clear from the news reports.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.